Harriet Harriss
Spaces of Solastalgia
Exhibition & Workshop for the Institute for Public Architecture Residency, 2024
About
Pratt Institute’s Dr. Harriet Harriss exhibition offered a glimpse into the research for her forthcoming book on the ‘Spaces of Solastalgia,’ - meaning comfort from climate grief - by presenting four near-future solastalgic scenarios using Governors Island as a prototypical test site.
The first solastalgic space invites but also requires humans to pollinate plants, due to the decline and collapse of our pollinator species, which include bees, birds, rats, bats, lizards and a variety of insects.
The second offers a multi-species grieving space for mourning with & for birds - a million of which die each year colliding with NYC’s buildings, and a billion across the country. It also proposes an addendum to NYS Senate Bill S7098, making retrofitting nyc’s bird-killing skyscrapers mandatory.
The third scenario envisions a strategy for aqua-composting New Yorkers via sea burial (legal in New York) as a means to reinstate reefs, protect the city against storm surges and flooding, and avoid the 15,000 tons of carbon generated by cremating NY’ers each year. By using readily available oyster shells and kelp to create funeral shrouds, human bodies would be weighed to rest on the sea bed and consumed within a matter of weeks.
And, the fourth and final solastalgic scenario envisages resurrecting a first-peoples’ tradition of elevated burials with composted humans (legal in NYC since 2023) providing nutrients to edible plants that will be needed when Governors Island eventually floods and only 3500 skeletal trees remain as a growing scaffold.
The work contends that by creating spaces where humans - and potentially other species - can come together to find comfort from climate grief, collective suffering can be alleviated and new life can emerge in the middle of the sixth mass extinction.
Reflecting on her experience as a writer in residence at the IPA, Dr. Harriss commented on the value of being given an opportunity to engage the public, to collaborate with the other fellows and existing Island residents such as Earthmatter, and on the importance of delving deep into the troubled historical and archaeological past of Governors Island, as well as the need to confront immediate climate challenges the Island is facing in order to richly inform the thesis of her next book.